macskull

It wouldn't break the game at all, though, but that's not really the point. More on-topic, short of teaming with a Kinetics character to give you Increase Density every 90 seconds (?) you could always use an empowerment station in your SG base for the knockback protection base buff but the drawback there is you have to renew it every hour or so. In reality the simplest solution is just to slot a knockback protection IO in any power that'll take it (I take Combat Jumping on every single one of my builds so it's pretty much a free slot for one). They're not expensive.

Generally speaking, procs in auras aren't as good as they were before but procs pretty much everywhere else are way way way better than they ever were on live. You can do things now with PPM that would make old "proc monster" builds blush. "PPM for everything" was an I24 beta change. Only the store-bought enhancements from the Paragon Market used PPM while the game was live.

lol

Every player and NPC has mag 1 protection against any kind of mez just for existing, though you won't find this in the combat attributes anywhere. This is why you can get hit with, say, Dominate from Malaise (mag 3) and you'll still be fine if you're running Acrobatics. I can't find a list but I'm pretty sure the only other holds that exceed mag 3 in the game also exceed mag 10 which means they'll also tag any melee characters through their mez protection toggle/click power. That changed in issue 12 because I think the point was never for it to have complete KB immunity. At least now it's 9 points (2 of which are enhanceable so you could in theory get it as high as 13.2 points or so but that'd require 6 slots. Basically yeah Acrobatics isn't useful for a PvE build unless you're foregoing IOs entirely, but it's pretty much mandatory for a PvP build if you don't have in-set knockback resistance and protection.

The closest way to reproduce the exact same situation on both ATs is to run both builds through identical content multiple times and compare results, to try and eliminate outliers and variables and establish what you should be seeing, and that's exactly what I did. I didn't save the numbers, but what I saw was that both builds were pretty consistently in the 3:30-4:00 range on a particular AE farm. Fiery melee on a Tanker will outperform its Brute counterpart simply because it's got a second PBAoE but Combustion's animation time is pretty awful, and then it's the question of whether it would outperform rad or spines and I'm pretty sure the answer is no simply because so much of your damage over a long period of time comes from that damage aura.

Well that's about as far from a "fix" as you can possibly get, so there's that... EDIT: /ah was a veteran reward back on live, and pretty much every other veteran reward has been either passed out for free or is purchasable for inf at the P2W vendor so I don't see /ah going away anytime soon.

Agree with most of this but Forge - Therm already gives pretty solid +res in the shields without needing an extra source, and Forge is the best single-target ally damage buff in the game (50% on Defenders, 40% on Corruptors/Controllers, 30% on MMs). Painbringer's +dam value is slightly higher, of course, but you can only keep that on one person at a time without some significant recharge buffs.

To be fair that was a comparison of a single powerset combination, though I don't think the results would be much different for any set. I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of a powerset that leverages the increased Tanker target caps to the point where it would clearly outperform a Rad/Fire Brute. Basically my take on it is that a Tanker will farm fairly well after the changes if that's something you're really interested in, but the Brute is still going to be better. In the earlier versions of the Tanker changes my opinion was different, but the damage cap going from 600% to 500% and the radius/arc buffs being 50% instead of 100% made a big difference.

Dude I want some of whatever you are smoking.

A version of City Info Tracker that polls the servers in realtime and gives you character data (enhancements, recipes, inf, badges, etc.) so I don't have to log in to a dozen characters trying to find that one purple I swear I've got somewhere. Since this already exists somewhere, it shouldn't be hard to make happen here though I imagine it'd be a little bit resource-intensive.

It was not entirely uncommon on the redside ladder at least for people to see holds stacked as high as mag 40 on a single target in an attempt to drop their toggles for a quick kill which meant that team's therms were busy stacking Thaw on that target to keep them from getting mezzed. That kind of thing didn't happen heroside because the most common blast sets (fire before I12, psi after I12) didn't have any real mez to stack but if you brought back PvE mez rules against, say, a team full of beam Blasters/Corruptors/Defenders you'd be able to easily punch through one CM and probably even two with the amount of mez powers that make up a standard attack chain. It might not be mag 40 but it's certainly not something you'd be able to just shrug off either. The mez changes were one of the most contentious I13 changes - the old mez system wasn't great but the new one is arguably worse. There's probably a medium to be had there.

I think you're seriously overstating how much recharge slows have changed. They're effective enough where people still occasionally run things like colds to mess with people in team matches.

If that's the case it's probably due to diminishing returns, but as I'm sure you know, being on the receiving end of -300% recharge still means you can't do anything once you've fired off your attack chain.

I've been on the receiving end of Heat Loss and you still play the "look at those tiny power icons" game. Recharge slows don't need any help, they work just fine.

Literally nothing has changed about -recharge between pre-I13 and post-I13. It's not like movement slows where they removed -maxrunspeed from the PvP attributes. EDIT: I suppose that's not entirely true, Defender debuffs used to be unresisted and now they're not, but almost no non-melee builds have slow resistance and most of the melee sets that don't get it in PvE only get 30% in PvP.

Actually this is not the case, heal and absorb are flagged as different effects and alpha abilities that boost heal don't boost absorb, and vice versa.

This is a combination of things - all melee armor sets get 30% (I think?) debuff resistance for free if they don't already have it, the -maxrunspeed attribute was removed from movement slow powers in PvP, and movement speed buffs/debuffs DR pretty harshly. Recharge slows are still a thing and are still very painful, but I agree that movement slows should be useful again. If nothing else it'd give teams more incentive to run a kin.

Honestly the movement speed is what makes this game's PvP so good. Way more reflex-based and fast-paced than other MMO PvP tends to be.

There's also diminishing returns in PvP which affects any stacking buffs. Incandescence is no exception to this.

I wanted to address the highlighted part - the fact that a melee fiteklub duel can go on for 10+ minutes with neither killing the other while they're both standing toe-to-toe has less to do with the damage either character is putting out and more to do with how survivable they are. Hell, even if you take your standard ranged damage dealers and try to spike damage onto a Tanker or Brute you will probably not be able to kill them unless your damage is perfectly timed. If you stuck a Blaster in melee range of a Tanker and neither was allowed to move or use inspirations (which is pretty much what fiteklub is) the Tanker would win that fight nine times out of ten. Re: +/- range and webnades... you can double-stack taunt and it'll floor an opponent's range, or at the very least force them close enough to you that you can close the gap and get attacks off while they're animating to attack you. Outside of the arena's temp webnade powers you either have to be devices, trick arrow, or traps to get webnades (or /TA on a Blaster but Entangling Net Arrow is banned in competitive arena play) and none of those are particularly common, or you have to run Mace Mastery for that webnade and end up with a defense shield which is in most cases pretty bad on squishies. A big part of the "headsplitter crits used to hurt" thing is the change to normalizing damage vs animation times and the removal of unresisted critical damage. I'd be okay with making crits unresisted or at least partly unresisted again. You could put any number of AVs up against a single player and the only "difficulty" in that sense is that even with softcapped defense, eventually enough attacks will land that the player will die (though I've also soloed the ITF where you get to deal with Romulus and all the AV-level Nicti at the same time) I can get on my Stalker and AFK in the middle of one of the huge groups of monsters in the Hive for a long time and probably won't die. This game's PvE isn't challenging unless you intentionally make it more difficult for yourself, which is why I PvP. The reason spiking is the most common thing you see in high-level PvP is because it's the most effective way to deal damage - if you're not coordinated on a target their Emp will heal them, or they'll evade around geometry, or they'll phase. It sounds simple in practice - "tab to the target, throw some attacks when the caller says 'go,' and move on to the next one" but there's a whole lot more to it than that.

To be fair, it was "lolJustice" for a reason, and I'm saying that as someone who got his start there.

No, not really. My Fire/Cold Corruptor can solo most AVs and GMs with impunity, they're just big sacks of HP that I have to DPS through. They don't move around, I have enough defense where they can't hit me, they don't try new things every time I fight them, and they don't learn from their mistakes. They're only "difficult" in the sense that they have a lot of HP and hit pretty hard if they manage to land an attack.

There is more potential to get people into the zones. Rewards for engaging in PvP would be a good start and it doesn't take any mechanics changes to make that happen, but in reality unless someone is already interested in PvP in the first place there is nothing that is going to get them to start doing it and stick with it. The biggest barriers to new players entering PvP are: PvP functions almost completely differently from PvE so there's a relatively steep learning curve, especially if you don't understand the game mechanics well PvP opponents tend to be more powerful, smarter, and have access to a wider array of powers than anything you'd see in PvE Most people don't handle defeat well and after dying a handful of times will decide they hate PvP and PvPers are a bunch of jerks Some of the Issue 13 PvP changes were good, some were well-intentioned but poorly implemented, and others just plain sucked. The problem with those changes was that they were designed to draw new players into PvP by making it more accessible to the casual player but for the most part those changes failed to take any of those three items I listed into account so what ended up happening was you got almost no new players interested but lost a large portion of the established player base. If you're going to make further mechanics changes, they should not be designed with the primary objective of getting new players involved because there's no guarantee that will happen and unless you're making those changes with the input of people that actually do PvP, you're likely to alienate those players as well.

In an effort to keep things constructive and ensure there's some discussion here, I'll offer the following points which I've said here and elsewhere when this sort of discussion comes up: Most of the discussions, suggestions, and arguments here are revolving around team-based arena PvP and there's not so much discussion about zone PvP or duels because by their very nature those are pretty much impossible to balance on a broad scale. Dueling in this game has always been very rock/paper/scissors, and some melee builds were incredibly popular for dueling (hello, Ice/Energy Tankers and Spines/Regen Scrappers). Zone PvP is usually an "anything goes" environment and it's very rare that both sides are evenly balanced numbers-wise (which is really why I wish Warburg was more active, because at least that way anyone not on your team is fair game). In the case of team PvP in a game where movement is as important as it is, naturally you want the ability to deal a large amount of damage to a single target within a very short period of time (before they can phase/break line of sight/get healed) and ranged ATs are (usually) the best way to do this because they don't have to be in melee range to deal their damage. It's also important to note that because PvP is so vastly different than PvE (and this was true even before the PvP overhaul in Issue 13) the defined "roles" an AT has in PvE might be very different or simply nonexistent in PvP. Most melee ATs are more than capable of putting out solid amounts of damage in melee range, and some can even put out good ranged damage, but they can't do it as consistently or as quickly as a ranged AT can. The game already has several tools to help melee players close the gap to ranged ATs (web grenades and a stackable 75% range debuff from taunt are the two major ones) but in reality you can't expect a character who has much higher survivability than a ranged AT to also be able to consistently put out as much damage as a ranged AT. To your point re: ranged ATs being "damage soaking machines," you can take a look at the first match in the linked video to see just how quickly ranged ATs explode when targeted versus how long it took for that Tanker to go down the one time he was targeted.

I'll take "things that are highly unlikely" for 400, Alex.